frissure a collaborative work between kathleen jamie and brigid collins
A word from Brigid Collins: Artist, Illustrator and Educator
An introduction by Kathleen Jamie: Poet, Essayist and Travel Writer
Although my gaze was initially directed toward the body, it gradually began to move outwards, as a way of trying to lift what I saw out into the world. Despite never before attempting anything like this, I trusted to my instincts. This has been a transforming process, for myself as much as my work. My early responses, while they were recording and excavating what I saw, were trying too hard to become ‘pictures’. A new process began to evolve. By moving through layers from the known – in terms of approach and technique – to the unknown I began to uncover aspects that needed to be shed. Using a sketchbook has always been a way of working that has brought me a sense of freedom, but the approach I now began to adopt encouraged me to value process over any sense of resolution. So I learned, for example, to allow the spine of the page to become visible as I worked across it. Through Frissure, I have learned to convert the process that we call ‘healing’ into something material and tangible, into art.
In the month I turned 49 – it was May – I was diagnosed with breast cancer. As anyone will tell you who’s done it – and we are legion – the first few days and weeks were times of anxious waiting, and of clinic appointments, needles, scans and consultations. Also, for me, it seemed ironic: a case of life imitating art. Over the last several years I had spent time in medical museums gazing at body-parts preserved in oils, and I’d studied many 19th century medical illustrations. These had informed my work. I’d gone so far as to publish an essay called ‘Pathologies’, about what happened in the pathology lab at Ninewells in Dundee, my nearest teaching hospital. There, I’d been shown a cancerous tumour in a colon, and – on screen – in a liver, and I’d been shown how slides are prepared with tissue taken from breast lumps. I’d looked down microscopes and I’d learned a little of how pathologists diagnose and treat cancer, amongst other diseases. Then, suddenly, it was my turn: my own body was the subject of this attention, my biopsies were sent to in the very lab I had visited. I found this reassuring because I could picture what was happening, and why. Why the interest in lymph nodes, what they looked and felt like. That experience, as well as the love of my family and friends, and the marvelous nurses, stabilized me in those difficult weeks. Throughout, I tried to keep looking. Because I expressed an interest, I was shown my own mammogram images. I sat beside the radiologist in front of her computer screen, as she pointed with her pencil. The image was rather beautiful, a grey-glowing circle, like the full moon seen through binoculars. The tumour
Wound after removal of Mamma and Axillary Glands, stitched. Showing the button stitches of relaxation, and the stitches of coaptation. Print from an illustration by Sir W. Watson Cheyne, from Antiseptic Surgery, its principles, practice, history and results, (1882) published by Smith, Elder & Co.
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was an obvious density. The radiologist and pathologist looked with their eyes, the surgeon with his fingertips. I was extremely fortunate. The cancer was caught early. I had a mastectomy, but was spared the need for chemotherapy. The survival rates for people like me are high nowadays. By then it was July. Recovering from the operation was bliss of a sort. Between summer showers, I lay in the garden. Birds arrived in the rowan tree, a density in their branches, then flew off again. No-one wanted anything of me, I received nothing but kindness and gifts. Living quietly, I noticed flowers, especially roses in the park, as never before. I walked by the river and slept better than I had in years. One day, about six weeks after the operation, when the wound was healed, I was looking at my new scar in the bathroom mirror. It wraps horizontally from breastbone round onto my back, with a branch-line into my armpit. I can only see it in the mirror, of course, with a mirror’s reversals. I saw it as a site of change, of injury. But also, something in its shape made me pause. As I turned this way and that, I thought it looked like the low shores of an island, seen from afar. Or a river, seen from above. A bird’s eye view of a river. Or a map. Then, I fancied it looked like the stem of a rose. With that, a line of Burns arrived in my head. ’You seize the flo’er, the bloom is shed’. Whatever it was, it was a line, drawn on my body. A line, in poetry, opens up possibilities within the language, and brings forth voice out of silence. What is the first thing an artist does, beginning a new work? He or she draws a line. And now I had a line, quite a line! inscribed on my body. It looked like a landscape. Because it was changing colour as it healed, it seemed to me as if it had its own weather. Brigid Collins is an artist who works with many materials: watercolours and oils, and also with petals, grasses, seed-pods,
Water colour of a carcinoma of the left mamma by A.K. Maxwell.Watercolour presented by J. Hogarth Pringle.
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papers and threads of all sorts, and wax and gauze and wire. She makes images and 3 dimensional objects, and she incorporates into her work words and lines of poetry too, almost as a material. She is more acutely attuned to the poetic line than many a poet. The last time we’d met, before I was ill, Brigid had said ‘I’ve been drawing figs, I’m just fascinated by them, observing them as they change and ripen’. And then, ‘I’m thinking of doing some life-drawing again, I haven’t done any for a while.’ Because of that, and not without some hesitancy, I asked Brigid if she might draw this curious line of mine. If she might be my eyes. I felt sure she’d understand what I meant, and I trusted her, although it was an odd idea. I said I wanted it off my body and onto paper, so we could both have a proper look at it. Not as documentary, not like the work of the surgeon/artists and medical illustrators of old, although my debt to those people was in my mind, but as a starting point. I told Brigid I’d seen in my scar several referents to the natural world, to change, to the things beyond itself: maps, rivers, roses, fruit. Also, and privately, I felt that sitting for an artist might even things up, so to speak. I’d been subject to a lot of medical gaze, and was curious about an artist’s. An artist’s would be different. For sure, Brigid’s cluttered studio was a far cry from a clinic or operating theatre. I suppose I felt, obscurely, that I could repay a debt to those patients of the past, who had suffered themselves to be drawn by medical illustrators, who had no hope of recovery, as I had. Though we didn’t know at first what we were doing, over several sittings we established a protocol. Always we began with conversation. We spoke about life and work, family, births, deaths, personal histories, flowers or birds we’d seen. We spoke about the pressures of the modern world and the place of the
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WILD MUSIC On paper prepared with lightly pigmented gesso and layered with shellac, I scored lines to allow for deeper pigmentation, later. Kathleen had already written a fragment of prose on the paper using a pen filled with masking fluid. I then tore the paper, creating a deep cut across its surface, which I brought together with thin strips of surgical tape before rubbing a layer of pigment, in a shade called Caput Mortuum, into the whole surface. I then scattered rose petals along one edge and afterwards applied flecks of gold leaf, painted a layer of wax along the torn edge and added a smattering of wax amongst the petals and text. That the gentle, dreamlike tone of the words and petals mingles freely with the contrasting tone of the scored and torn lines evokes how my imagination had responded to K’s experience.
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artist, especially if she’s a woman. After a while, by a process I can’t guess at, Brigid would have chosen her materials for the day. One week she said she wanted to try oil sticks, the next time she had decided that watercolour was better, because more subtle. We spoke about clothes and dresses, hairdressers, plastic surgery and breast implants. Beauty, in short. We talked about the things women talk about. Then, when we felt ready, I’d halfremove my clothes, sit in the chair, my left side exposed. What happened then was, for me, very pleasant. Soon the peace of the studio descended, and, as Brigid worked, I’d drift almost to sleep. I’ve always loved distant sounds in the afternoon: a clatter in the stairwell, a faraway shout on the street. The world went about its business as Brigid drew or painted quietly, and I dozed. What I noticed, made a point of noticing, before I drifted off, was the way she looked at me, at my body, before she moved to make a mark on the paper. She’d spend some long moments looking steadily, considering. Then, she’d make a move, that first line. As she worked, her eyes flicked up and down. To me, to the paper, me, the paper, me, as her hand moved. It was indeed different to the medical looking, longer and softer. In this way Brigid made initial drawings and after I’d gone she worked on these, applying pieces of gauze, gold, shimmery blue thread. We still didn’t know what we were doing, but we trusted the process. It wasn’t always straightforward. I went through all the hesitancies and ambivalence I was unable to indulge during the cancer diagnosis and treatment, because that is so swift and shocking. Months later, I was still a bit shocked. One example. I reacted badly to the first image Brigid made. I sat for her, then went home. Then, as was her practice, she worked up the image, bringing her own artistry to it. Because she loves threads and wires, I knew the idea of using surgical thread, the kind used for sutures, appealed to her.
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HEREDIT Y 1 For the first time since I was a girl, I see my heart flutter under my ribs.
FOR THE FIRST TIME Dreams played an important part in my responses. Marks on the body became transformed into a landscape (of experience) and Kathleen’s descriptions of surgical ‘threads’ became rhythmic markers along a hypothetical pathway, or river.
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After a week, she e-mailed me the picture. It was obviously my scar line – I’d know it anywhere now – but the horizontal was gashed with verticals, and fringed with turquoise threads. I was horrified at first, for myself and for my surgeon. My scar is not Frankensteinian. I felt suddenly protective of it, and had to tell Brigid that I was disturbed by the seeming violence of her image. I considered calling the whole thing off. The project was stupid anyway, vain, narcissistic and weird. But I was overreacting. She had been engaged in her artists’ world of textures and colours, and had simply brought to her work aspects of her own history and imagination. This is what I learned: having an artist work with ‘my scar’ or ‘my body’ meant I had to relinquish myself just as surely as I had during my medical treatment. Perhaps more so. The doctors’ and nurses’ intention is to return one’s body successfully treated, the damage limited. Nowadays, the rhetoric is greatly toward the patient’s ‘choice’. Certainly, ‘informed consent’. The patient is in charge, or so the rhetoric goes. In working with Brigid, I came to understand that the images she would produce were not ‘mine’. By inviting, or consenting to her artist’s gaze, I had to allow her interpretation. I had to allow her to do her job. I admire the cool, precise looking of the pathologist and the surgeon, and I also admire the transforming, creative imagination of the artist. That meant allowing Brigid to bring to her images aspects of her own life and history, her own losses and insights. At no time did Brigid encroach or insist. She met all my concerns with compassion. The idea evolved that I’d write some short texts that Brigid could use within the work, as she pleased, so we’d both bring our imaginative skills to bear and there would be a measure of reciprocity.
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At first I tried to write ‘poems’ but the tone was all wrong. Too smart, too concluded. A looser weave was required, something thready, gauzy, that could be unpicked. Thready? Gauzy? Brigid’s work was having its effect on me. So, I wrote a few pieces (fragments? prose-poems?) from notes I’d made across the summer when I was recovering. It seemed that they were falling into themes, though the themes blended into each other. Healing, certainly. Mortality, of course. The idea of the gift. Intimacy. The natural world. The notion of the line. Memory and heredity. All had arisen during my treatment and recovery, but none was strictly medical. In Brigid’s work the little texts are not repeated whole, but in part, fugitive. Now it is time to present this work. We’re calling it ‘Frissure’: a word coined by Brigid quite by accident, which falls between ‘frisson’ and ‘fissure’. The naked, scarred body certainly causes a frisson. As time passes though, my scar looks less and less like a fissure. It is quite faded and I’m used to it now. I’m hesitant about presenting this work, but in Brigid’s care the line has become a starting place. Here it is transformed into a rose-stem, a river, a faraway island, the dawn sky. It leads from fear and loss back into the beautiful world. Kathleen Jamie YOU SEIZE THE FLO’ER Attracted by the notion of transforming traces of a bodily experience into natural forms, I began with a familiar, ‘illustrative’ approach. I made studies in watercolour of wild Dog Roses at different stages in their life cycle. A quotation from Robert Burns falls off the edges of the page and flanks the rose stems, which had been laid out in a tracery of K’s scar with colour washes laid down, to create a mood. FRISSURE page 12
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HEREDIT Y 2 Isabella Telford, Margaret Hewit, Isabella Thomson, Margaret Stirling, Isabella Parker. Girls of the the Borders and Ayrshire, of hills and rivers and burghs, they married blacksmiths, joiners, miners; bore and nursed children. If employed, they were servants in richer people’s houses. Their men fought in wars, some returned damaged. Though we span two centuries, we could all sit round the same table. I’d like fine to hear their rich Scots speech! My grandmother called her breast her ‘breist’, her bosom her ‘kist’. ‘Come for a wee nurse aff yer Nana’, she’d say. ‘Courie in, hen’.
“COURIE IN, HEN” The annual rush of indomitable little harebells springing up from every crevice in the rocks around Edinburgh’s Salisbury Crags always reassures me. This year it brought to mind another of K’s fragments. Something about their blue, and the ochres, pinks and greens around me as I walked suggested that mood. That they gather in the same place at the same time each year reminded me of being a small child at family gatherings within a protective circle of women, discussing their lives.
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KIST A small, three-dimensional form began to emerge from what was by now a very playful process. I call these forms Poem-Houses. They are places of safe-keeping – for words, memories, experiences – and are at once fragile and strong. I was creating a feminine embrace, a container, a sewing-box, or skirt, which might keep one safe from the world. Dialectics of inside and out also brought to mind the push-pull tension of being in such an embrace. I was reminded of how the individual identities of women have often become subsumed by their domestic roles.
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SE P TEMBER In September countless sand and house-martins jazz above the river, taking insects from the surface, from the air, thousands of them kissing the river farewell. They creak, a sound like the air rubbing against itself. Summer is everything they know; they’re preparing themselves, sensing in the shortening days a door they must dash through before it shuts.
IN SEPTEMBER Walking by a river inspired the mood in this piece. The text, emerging from the inky, watery flow was taken from fragments written by K early on in our process. I lost the moon but gained the river is stamped into one side of the composition and I am my own worst enemy on the other. It seemed pertinent to include these as symbols of how much has changed since we began our conversation. Placing them on ‘opposing’ sides of a subtly delineated ‘spine’ highlights how the polarisation that they suggest has now begun to disappear. The flow of the river is depicted in ink, a highly fugitive medium. Small, delicate book forms of Japanese tissue paper, held to the painting’s surface by thin silver wire ‘jazz’ like sand and house martins above a river.
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